Boxing History Sim - The Heavyweight Weight Class

[Critch]

I was looking through the saved email on my old AOL address and I stumbled across an elicense receipt from 2008 for Title Bout Championship Boxing 2.5. The install package was still on OOTP's website and surprisingly the elicense licensing worked (better than the 2008 experience) and I'm now the proud owner of Title Bout 2.5 again. It even starts when I click the shortcut.

It's a Federal Holiday weekend and my wife is out of town until Tuesday so I'm stuck home alone, home-bound because I'm one of the few people in the US who can't drive and I cant be bothered walking anywhere. I've got nothing pressing to do, there's no soccer worth watching on tv (stupid international break), so other than occasionally checking my work email, watching youtube, and hopefully remembering to feed the cats, my diary is empty. So why not spend the time simulating the history of boxing? It's better than wasting the time.

Title Bout Championship Boxing
Title Bout was originally a board game, all cards and ratings and dice, a very 1970's kind of thing. That spawned the original computer based version in the 90s (I think), then 2.0 in 2005. OOTP then bought the title from the original developers and released a more polished and patched 2.5 updated version in 2008 before selling the game onto PISD who released Title Bout 2013 in 2013. Unfortunately that version was an absolute mess, it just didn't work and was never patched. An absolute rip off, it used to annoy me when PISD's logo showed up on the OOTP start menu screen. The money-stealing bastards.

So 2.5 is the last half-decent version. It's a bit clunky and it's a simulator not a real game. But it's not bad. I think just simming, watching along and not managing works for boxing.

The Plan
Originally I was going to try simulating multiple weight-classes but that was all a bit too complicated and bound to get messed up either through bugs or basic user-error, I'm still learning how to run this sim. So the plan became one weight class only from 1920-ish onwards. It was going to be 1920 but I changed plans midstream and the first World Champion will now be in 1919. Rather than a 1920 start we'll call it "Post World War I".

I'm not a boxing fan, the history is interesting but I wouldn't sit down and watch a fight. One of my old friends was a big boxing fan and he used to drone on and on about how real boxing fans like the lighter weight-classes as they're based around boxing skill, defense and speed, and casual fans like the heavyweights because it's just big guys punching each other. Being a casual fan, it's the heavyweights whose names I recognize so I guess that's what I'm going with.

The 1920's with the heayweights is a good time to start though, a few all-time greats are active (Jack Dempsey, Gene Tunney, Billy Miske), and a few more are on the horizon (Max Schmelling, Jersey Joe Walcott, Joe Louis). A real golden period for the heavyweights.

The first steps were zooming through a few years to get the universe started, a few years of the upcoming big names beating on complete (game-generated) nobodies to pad their records before we get to the actual World Championships. In this universe there are not multiple associations, no multiple World Champions, there will always just be one. And there are no continental or regional champions. It's World Champion or nothing.

The Schedule
Most of the scheduling will be done by me assigning boxers to groups (Challengers>Contenders>Journeymen>Rookies>Elite TCs>TCs) and using the autoscheduler to pair groups off against each other. The only thing I'll be hand-scheduling is the championship fights, everything else is autoscheduler. (nb Elite TCs and TCs are game-generated no-marks who will generally lose. I cant remember what TC stands for, I got it from the Title Bout website years ago. Maybe Trash Cans? Tomato Cans? And it's only generally lose because one of these nobodies knocked out Jack Dempsey in the first round in the setup simming).

When a boxer gets to his Career Start Date in the Title Bout database he becomes active in the game in the "Rookie" group with his career stage set to "Beginning". He'll fight every two months against game-generated TCs for the first two years padding his record and updating his career stage from "Beginning" to "Pre-Prime" and then graduate to "Journeyman" or "Contender" groups where he'll fight 4 times a year against a variety of levels of opponent. With this experience he'll go from Pre-Prime to Prime and be at the top of his game in time to be a challenger. All the aging is game controlled and slightly randomized, all fighters wont age at the same rate. If he is good enough to get to a Title fight he'll drop down to only 1 fight in a 6 months period. Thank goodness for excel to keep this all controlled.

Going with this schedule a regular fighter with a 12 year career will have just over 50 fights on his record. A little low for this period, one of the original fighters in this run (Bartley Madden) finished with 200 fights on his record in real life and his main ability was "taking a punch", but he was "punchy" when he died at 40 so he'd have been better with off this scheduling.

The Set Up
Starting with 1916 I've simmed the Rookies early years, added in new fighters as they hit their career start in the database, and after three years the original guys have 16 fights on their records. It's now January 1919 and the only unbeaten fighter is Billy Miske with 16 wins, 6 by KO, Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney are both at 15-1-0 (Dempsey has 14 KOs in 15 wins), then Bill Brennan and Charley Weinert at 12-4-0, followed by John Lester Johnson (11-4-1). Biggest drop off was Chuck "The Hoosier Playboy" Wiggins (9-6-1), he was right at the top of the rankings but has gone over a year without a win and fallen away. There's also Argentinian Luis Firpo at 11-1-0, he started a year after everybody else but is ranked in the top 4. I haven't decided if a newbie should be eligible.

As of January 1st 1919 we've got 19 fighters in the Journeyman group (I'm not moving anybody to Contenders until after their next fight) and 6 in the Rookies group, and 60 game-generated TCs. It's all a bit thin back in the 1920s, only 25 real life fighters, but as it moves forward there will be more and more fighters rated for the game so it'll fill out.

The plan for 1919 is that the Real fighters will face each other in January and after that the top four in the rankings will face off in June in a pair of World Championship elimination bouts with the two winners fighting a World Championship bout in December. And then we'll be set to run through Dempsey, Tunney, Louis, Marciano, Liston, Ali, Tyson right up to whoever the champion is nowadays, some Ukrainian guy probably. Or until the game crashes and wrecks the save.

[Critch]

1919 First half.

New Talent
In the game each fighter has a page of rating, style settings, punch %ages, it's a complicated set up but they also have a single number "Overall" rating. The Overall rating range from 0 (the TCs) up to 15 (Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Robinson). From the current batch when they reach their prime we'll have Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney at 13 and Billy Miske at 10. Double figures is a championship contender, twelve-ish is generally "all-time great" level. From the rookies this year there is one who'll eventually be a 10-level, Godfrey George "The Leiperville Shadow". 6'4'' and 240lbs, apparently massive for a heavyweight then, he was Jack Dempsey's training partner and also the World Colored Heavyweight Champion. That won't be a title in my improved and unified universe, he'll be a contender in a few years time.

As I've been simming this I've been reading about the fighters on wiki and boxrec.com, a number of them died young in real life. So far Billy Miske (died in 1924 from liver disease, apparently knew he was terminally ill but kept on fighting to leave money for his family), Bill Brennan (died in 1924, retired and bought a bar in New York, was shot to death by gangsters for not buying their beer), Chuck Wiggins (retired to alcohol and petty crime in Indiana and died at 42 after falling down a flight of stairs. Allegedly may have been murdered by the police because he kept on knocking them out when they tried to arrest him.), and Bartley Madden (fell down the stairs at the DC Dept of Treasury building.)

January 1919
After three years of beating up on 0-rated TCs (or being beaten up by, Bud Gorman is 2-14, not sure what happened there), it's time for the real fighters to face off against each other. A kind of elimination round before the real eliminations in June. There are no real surprises, Billy Miske beat Ireland's Bartley Madden with a unanimous decision, Gene Tunney beat Albert Lloyd also by unanimous decision and Jack Dempsey came back from being knocked down in the first to knock out Ken Lenard in the 3rd. (There are only 19 real fighters in the contenders group so one TC had to be added, Ken Lenard was TC with the best record and Jack Dempsey got him by luck of the draw.)

The final place in the elimination four went down to the winner of #4 Luis Firpo (11-1-0 (4 kos)) v #6 Bill Brennan (12-4-0 (10 kos)). It goes to a majority decision, two going for Brennan and the other calling a draw, so Bill Brennan leapfrogs into the elimination 4. In June it will be #1 Billy Miske v #4 Bill Brennan and #2 Jack Dempsey v #3 Gene Tunney.

June 1919
It's elimination time for the December's World Championship bout.

06-04-1919 #2 Jack Dempsey (16-1-0(15)) v #3 Gene Tunney (16-1-0(11)) Jersey City, NJ
In real life Jack Dempsey didnt fight Gene Tunney until 1927 and 1928 (Tunney won both), this time it's 1919. Gene Tunney is 22 years old and not in his prime yet while Jack Dempsey is 24 and in his prime, that difference makes Dempsey the heavy favorite. The early rounds are pretty evenly split, Dempsey has a slight lead with all three judges by the midway point. In the sixth round Tunney is running out of steam, he gets a warning for holding. He's just getting close and clinching before Dempsey takes control in the seventh and it's even more uneven in the 8th before the ref stops the fight at 2.40 in the 8th with Tunney wobbling and not able to defend himself from Dempsey's jabs. So that's the first spot settled.

06-20-1919 #1 Billy Miske (17-0-0(6)) v #4 Bill Brennan (13-4-0(10)) New York, NY
Is there a less imaginative boxing nickname than Bill "KO" Brennan? It's Chicago's Bill Brennan v St Paul's Billy Miske, if I'd read where they were from first I would have stuck it somewhere more Midwestern but it's The Polo Grounds, New York. Billy Miske should just have to turn up to win and that's how it starts out, he's well ahead on the judges cards after 4 rounds. The fifth is where it turns, with a minute to go Brennan lands a hook to Miske's temple and he's face down on the canvas. He gets up and hangs onto the bell while Brennan tries to finish it. The sixth is much the same, Brennan lands a punch and Miske is down on a knee. Again he holds on til the bell but a pair of 10-8 rounds for Brennan and the scoring has turned. Miske tries to get back into it, he opens a cut on Brennan's eyebrow in the ninth and the doctor is called to check it but the fight goes on. Miske is knocked down again in the 10th (all the fights so far have been 10 rounds), this time he's slower to get back up but hangs on to the end. The three knockdowns make the difference, Bill Brennan wins a unanimous decicion, the judges scoring it 96-91, 95-92, 95-92 for Brennan.

So December 1919 it'll be Jack Dempsey v Bill Brennan for the inaugural Heavyweight World Championship. Gene Tunney v Billy Miske is also scheduled, the winner will be the first challenger in June 1920 for World Champion Dempsey. Or Brennan. I suppose it could be Brennan.

[Critch]

1919 Second half

Other Things
Obviously it's not just the championship fights that are going on, all the other unnamed folks are punching each other when scheduled.

Some notables:

• Rookie George Godfrey has finished his first year in the universe and ends with a 6-0-0 record, 4 by knockout. He'll have one more year padding his record and getting experience and then he'll be in with the big boys.
• Another Rookie Fighting Bob Martin is at 6-0-0. He's from West Virginia and he was American Expeditionary Force Heavyweight Champion in France and stayed on after WWI to become Inter-Allied champion. He's got one more year fighting no-names to go too. In real life he flamed out young, had neurological issues and injuries from car accidents and was banned from boxing for his own good. One unmentioned rule for this sim is that whenever a fighter gets to his real life career end he gets shifted to the "Post-Prime" stage of his career so he has to make his mark by 1923.
• Game-generated 0-rated boxer Grant Carter is up to number 6 in the rankings with an 8-3-2 record. The Tomato Cans (I looked it up, TC stands for Tomato Cans) weren't meant to do things like this.
• Charley Weinart has won 5 in a row and is up to number 5 in the rankings so he'll be in with a chance of being a challenger. Despite being called "The Newark Adonis", he's listed as Austrian as he was born in Budapest while it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. So going by that he's now European Champion since he's the highest ranked European ahead of England's Joe Beckett at 10 and Ireland's Bartley Madden at 14.

December 1919
By a strange coincidence in real life Jack Dempsey did fight Bill Brennan for the World Championship on 12/14/1920 in New York. In real life Dempsey knocked out Brennan in the 12th.

12-17-1919 #1 Jack Dempsey (17-1-0(16)) v #2 Bill Brennan (14-4-0(10)) New York, NY
Dempsey was strong favorite here, the first round was balanced but after that Dempsey took over. He won the 2nd, 3rd and 4th round comfortable, and knocked Brennan down with a hook in the 5th. In the 6th he put Brennan down again and only the bell saved him. In the 7th he was down again and looked shaken but the ref let him carry on. Dempsey won the 8th on points, then finished the fight in the 9th. He knocked Brennan down twice then knocked him out at 2.04. At the end one of the judges had Dempsey winning all 8 rounds, while the other two had him winning all but the first round. So a bit of a mismatch. The winner and the first Heavyweight World Champion is Jack Dempsey.

In the other elimination Gene Tunney beat Billy Miske on a split decision, two judges giving it to Tunney 97-94 while the other went for Miske 96-95. So Dempsey's first defense of his title will be June 2020 against Gene Tunney.